Who's right about the significance of the riots? Tony Blair or David Cameron? That's a tough one and in modern Britain many people will make up their mind (eg "neither") without reading a word of what either man has said.

That's part of the problem too. But the good news is that they're both right in parts and agree with each other more than the media would have us all believe.

As Andrew Sparrow reports this morning the prime minister used an article in yesterday's Sunday Express to repeat his belief that British society has deep-seated problems of thuggery, selfishness and greed. The ex-PM insisted in the Observer that this is not about national "moral decline" – Cameron's "slow-motion moral collapse" – or trashing our national reputation. It's basically about a small core of families living outside all social norms and substituting feral gangs for society.

I instinctively dislike Cameron's frequent "broken Britain" talk – too emotive, too sweeping. But I also recoil from Blair's insistence – attractively more optimistic though it is – when he asserts that today's younger generation is "more respectable, more responsible, more hardworking" than his was. You speak for yourself, young fellow. That's too sweeping too.

As a generalisation I'd wager we're more unruly, less honest, less polite across the generations, but especially among the young. Over lunch at the weekend I heard a teacher who enjoys teenagers' company argue that her charges are too cosetted, and nurture a misplaced sense of entitlement. That's why the real world comes as a serious shock to many of them. They sometimes strike me as both credulous and sentimental.

Blair's implied criticism of Cameron is that he ordered a review of all social policies as well as stronger policing, a cutback in excessive human rights culture, more discipline and social responsibility at home and in school.

Though Blair used to talk this kind of language too, most people are fine on these counts, the ex-PM argues: the problem is much more specific than that, a hard core (not just the poor) living beyond the pale. They need to be targeted, family by dysfunctional family. Remember, families, not individuals.

That sounds a bit like Cameron saying – as he did last week – that there are 120,000 families (a strangely precise figure?) that need to be tackled this way, and that his government intends to do so by the next election in 2015.

But as Blair's failures underline – he admits he came too late to this insight and that someone he doesn't mention let the policies all fall apart after 2007 – it's hard work and it can never be allowed to stop.

Naturally, the Daily Mail gets on Blair's case today with its customary efficiency. Upmarket columnist Stephen Glover, a considerably subtler operator than, say, Melanie Phillips, argues that Blair should at least have apologised for making things worse, though he credits him with not trying to blame coalition cuts for the riots.

Glover says that Labour barely touched welfare reform – it certainly tried, though the results were disappointing – and spent more on education than improved outcomes justified.

Inner-city schools were allowed to "rot" – not true. Toughest of all, Labour let too many immigrants into Britain who took most of the 1.6m jobs created between 1997 and 2010, which should have been forced on unemployed locals, the columnist protests.

There's truth in that too, but fixing it is easier said than done. The left complains that youth loses hope because it can't get skills or find jobs. But a lot of immigrants are both better skilled and better motivated: they find them. A friend of mine employs a delightful (male) North American immigrant, here many years, to clean her home once a week. "We have a first-world cleaner," she explains.

The right benefits from this influx of hardworking employees, but complains about it instead of hiring ex-gang members to do the laundry or take apprenticeships, as Lord Phil Harris (he's a Tory peer too) – whose carpet business in Tottenham was burned down in the riot – says firms should.

They'll all find it harder do than propose, which is not to say it's not worth trying. Every little helps. In office Labour poured effort and money into trying to expand opportunity and curb antisocial behaviour but – despite successes and unhelpful opposition criticism – found it was pushing a boulder up hill. And you can't stop pushing to get your breath back either. The boulder rolls straight back down and loots Foot Locker.

Yet I'm with Glover when he dismisses Blair's call to ignore MPs' expenses or bankers' bonuses in assessing what the riots were about. The idea that MPs were more hardworking or that corporations were more honest in his youth – he was elected in 1983 – is silly, the former MP for Sedgefield reminded Observer readers.

People now are far more sensitive to issues of race or gender, companies more socially responsible, he says.

That's true, as far as it goes. But it's much more pervasive than that. Money has more status than it used to have and we are all invited to be judged by it. You only have to open the newspapers or switch on the TV to detect how much coarser, more materialistic and crude great swaths of society have become in the process – either in their practices or in terms of what they tolerate with a shrug. In so far as it's a left-right thing both sides have done their share of incitement.

A few days after the recent riots I tore a few examples of what I mean out of my favourite tabloid, the Mail. The day's crop included: "Rapist attacked same woman in same place twice in three months", "Tycoon's drink-driving son killed wealthy couple as they strode home along millionaire's row" (he'd just been made bankrupt and was feeling sorry for himself), "Heston leaves wife for cookbook goddess", "In tears the woman teacher who could face jail over affair with girl pupil of 15" and "Care home worker is held after resident dies."

Not a lovely crop, but one you can harvest any day of the week.

Since when we have seen the return of The X Factor — "full of nudity and foul-mouthed abuse", according to the Mail's extensive coverage this morning – not to mention another series of Big Brother on Channel 5, graced by Sally Bercow, wife of Mr Speaker. I don't watch more than half an episode of either in any one season. But I'm not sure they're an improvement on the TV Tony Blair didn't watch either when he was younger.

As with the rioters, what's missing here is much of a sense of shame (embarrassment is something different, so is guilt) among many of those caught doing foolish, greedy, degrading, dishonest, loutish, etc things pretty routinely.

Obviously in a week when Dominique Strauss-Khan looks set to walk free from a New York courtroom and Gérard Depardieu is peeing in the aisles of planes the problem isn't confined to Britain or even to Italy, where Mrs Bercow's exhibitionism would pass unremarked upon.

There's a lot of it about – always has been – but we seem to be going through a bad patch, hopefully a temporary one as we adjust to our diminished place in the global pecking order (except, unexpectedly, in cricket).

So there's going to be a reaction to all this – the scale of the riots were too big to ignore – though it's not yet clear what form it takes, hopefully more mature and measured than reactionary and brutal. Punishment is one thing, self-discipline is better.

But generations to come will look back on our excesses with disdain in much the same way that viewers of the BBC's overrated thriller, The Hour, are invited to regard all those dirty 1950s habits – racism, sexism, elitism and smoking – with self-satisfied horror. How could they take those bonuses! How could they loot Foot Locker? How could they get so drunk so often? The generation portrayed in The Hour would have felt much the same revulsion – survivors still do.

Blair ends his Observer article on an gracefully apologetic note, the sort of gesture Cameron will doubtless copy when needs must. When little James Bulger was brutally murdered in 1993 "I made a case in very similar terms to the one being heard today about moral breakdown in Britain. I now believe that speech was good politics but bad policy. Focus on the specific problem and we can begin on a proper solution," he writes.

Yes, but the specific problem is not just dysfunctional and feral families. It's kids swearing on the bus, it's me over-indulging the grandchildren (again), it's you dropping litter. It's even his friend Peter Mandelson poised to buy a new £8m house barely a year after leaving office. I'm sure it's all above board but, like a lot of things, it just doesn't feel right.